Data.gov has announced that it’s making some data sets available as RDF triples so Semantic Webbers can start playing with it. There’s an index of data here. The site says that even though only a relative handful of datasets have been RDF’ed, there are 6.4 billion triples available. They’ve got some examples of RDF-enabled visualizations here and here, and some more as well.

Data.gov also says they’re working with RPI to come up with a proposal for “a new encoding of datasets converted from CSV (and other formats) to RDF” to be presented for worldwide consideration: “We’re looking forward to a design discussion to determine the best scheme for persistent and dereferenceable government URI naming with the international community and the World Wide Web Consortium to promote international standards for persistent government data (and metadata) on the World Wide Web.” This is very cool. A Uniform Resource Identifier points to a resource; it is dereferenceable if there is some protocol for getting information about that resource. So, Data.gov and RPI are putting together a proposal for how government data can be given stable Web addresses that will predictably yield useful information about that data.

3 Responses to “Data.gov goes semantic”

This is just THE great step toward Web 3.0 and it is so good Data.gov has made it.

It is even more interesting to learn that they work on dereferencing of URIs thay use.

This is very important. For example in one the data sets named “Active Duty Martial Status”, there are multiple concepts like:
single_with_children_female
pay_grade
total_total
joint_service_marriage_total
joint_service_marriage_male
….

which, I presume, I clear for specialists, but are difficult to interpret correctly by non-specialists (despite meanigful names).

Having theirs descriptions (or definitions) available via their URI would enhance the data use even more.